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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

I'll use analogies with previous technologies.

Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. Gradually these grew up became empires and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions.

The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc).

Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam.

Radio, television and publicity shaped our daily lives to consume a lot of crap we don't really need, from cigarettes to diamond rings.

Social media shaped our political discourse into tribal stupidity and paranoia.

So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Technology shapes humans and culture. AI will shape humans and culture. We just don't know how.

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> Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam.

Copenhagen and Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city. It's not just that those cities were built before the car, it's that at some point they decided to stop shaping their city for the car.

> Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city.

This claim gets trotted out quite often, but it is only valid if you are specifically referring to the development of Amsterdam’s bicycle infrastructure. Even during those years when Amsterdam saw a rise in car traffic, the city never stopped offering public transit of the sort that most Americans could only dream of. So, the average resident was not forced to own a car.

I don't think that occurred through an act of God though. The point was that those cities didn't follow the American model because of the will of their people.

Also, it's worth noting that American cities demolished good infrastructure (for bikes, pedestrians, and transit) to make way for the veiled promises Big Auto and Big Oil. The transition to car dependence in America was a willful and deliberate act, albeit heavily influenced by lobbying and propaganda by auto and oil industries.

Agriculture did not shape monotheism. It happenrd both on nomadic and non nomadic nation's, as well as polytheistic religions of Asia. No correlation here.

Meanwhile currently AIs are just an empty linguistic models that have no proper knowledge, nor can tell what's true from what's fully BS, and will defend both or ask for forgiveness for telling both: truth and rubbish hallucination

Indeed oldest known surviving buildings are thought to be of religious and monumental in nature.[1] As far as we know it could be the religion which made people settle and do agriculture. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/gobeki-t...

AI will change society by getting rid of the necessity of vast numbers of people to be involved in production. Factories will become like farms, which need few people to produce goods for billions thanks to combine harvesters and so forth that were 20th century inventions. You'll have auto plants out in the middle of nowhere overseen by a few technicians. Cities will be for the poor. People will be stacked and warehoused on UBI. This is "Ze Sustainable awwnd incluzive fewcha [said in a thick german accent]."

Here, let me pull up Klaus Schwab's "Covid-19: The Great Reset."

"As far back as the Black Death that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 (and that suppressed 40% of Europe’s population in just a few years), workers discovered for the first time in their life that the power to change things was in their hands. Barely a year after the epidemic had subsided, textile workers in Saint-Omer (a small city in northern France) demanded and received successive wage rises. Two years later, many workers’ guilds negotiated shorter hours and higher pay, sometimes as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. Similar but less extreme examples of other pandemics point to the same conclusion: labour gains in power to the detriment of capital. Nowadays, this phenomenon may be exacerbated by the ageing of much of the population around the world (Africa and India are notable exceptions), but such a scenario today risks being radically altered by the rise of automation, an issue to which we will return in section 1.6. Unlike previous pandemics, it is far from certain that the COVID-19 crisis will tip the balance in favour of labour and against capital. For political and social reasons, it could, but technology changes the mix."

Schwab, Klaus; Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset (p. 39). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.

> and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions

I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly? Because Christianity and Islām became so popular?

Maybe by creating more unity in their societies?

Alternatively, follow the pre-Christian Ancient Roman approach and maintain unity by assimilating foreign religious practices. I think polytheism makes this method easier.

Christianity has assimilated other religions and their practices, though.

As a prime example, many elements of Christmas such as the yule log originate from so-called pagan religions such as Norse.

> Christianity has assimilated other religions and their practices, though.

And over the years Christians have persecuted many when their beliefs didn't agree with the dominant interpretation. The Romans were relatively tolerant of indigenous beliefs, as long as they didn't lead to rebellion.

At certain points in its history, Christianity was fairly eager to ingest aspects of existing religions if it meant that they got the account (conversion). This eventually became controversial (eg see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy), but a lot of early regional Christian saints, say, are, well, suspiciously similar to pre-existing deities or other pagan figures.

It’s that way in the Civilization tech tree, so it must be true!

Arguably the key point for Christianity and Islam wasn't that they were monotheistic, but that they were _proselytising_; their adherents had a strong incentive to spread them. Granted, a polytheistic religion is probably less likely to be proselytising; "those people over there have our gods and we have our gods, that's fine" is an easier proposition if you're okay with multiple gods in the first place. But it's not universal; notably the Romans tended to actively try to spread aspects of their religion to other polytheists (while also adopting foreign polytheistic concepts; Roman religion was messy). Conversely, Judaism does not proselytise.

I agree with your point that proselytizing is key. That and birth rates.

Slight tangent: Even under the frame of animist religions, there is sometimes the notion that the more worshippers a god has (and the more devout), the more powerful that god becomes. So using this frame, monotheistic religions have a more powerful god to use to "conquer" other gods.

Birth rates wouldn't historically have been a big differentiator. There are edge-cases, I suppose (some early Christian sects encouraged complete celibacy, for everyone!) but in general effective contraception wasn't available, and even where it _did_ exist (Romans _may_ have had some sort of somewhat effective contraceptive/abortifacient drug, say), it didn't attract all that much religious interest until the modern era.

This makes a lot of sense from a perspective where the "gods" are essentially ancient AI running on distributed (neural) hardware and communicating with itself via our standard human sensory channels that are able to hijack our wetware in proportion to our devotion. Monotheism then becomes a form of centralization of processing, restricting societies to a (more) unitary direction of intent [at the cost of much waste at the level of individual processing units (people)].

A slight tangent to your slight tangent: Monastic regimens look an awful lot like proof-of-work... Is the next step in facilitating the human-machine meta-minds minting AI crypto-religions?

Also, taking into account the earlier thread on Sci-Fi vs Sci-Fantasy, with a comment mentioning that science fiction tends to be current social commentary in the guise of the future: self-aware (and self-minting) currency a la Accelerando is an interesting analogy for religious, spiritual, cultural, and economic movements.

> Conversely, Judaism does not proselytise.

That is a later development. In the first millennium AD there were active attempts to export Judaism, the most famous result of which was the conversion of the Khazar kingdom to Judaism. And the very etymology of the word “proselytising” refers to Judaism making some inroads among other inhabitants of the Mediterranean.

Fair, it happened occasionally. In most cases where it’s well-documented, though, it seems like it was more realpolitik than the sort of “spreading the good word” approach of the other monotheistic faiths; AIUI the details of the Khazar case are a bit of a mystery.

> I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly?

In your life of plenty, poor people with nothing, were being ritually humiliated several times over, damming their mental health in hell. One god is less harmful to mental health.

Considering religion is psychological warfare in the absence of todays personal surveillance technological world, you would have thought some religions could be more forgiving for peoples misfortune, but is polytheism a classic example of power unchecked?

Hinduism was designed to normalise human deformities in a region struggling with environmental toxicity and poor health.

Christianity is best for a European climate, Islam is best for a Middle Eastern climate.

Religion was an attempt in the absence of simple items like pen and paper or infrastructure like schools and roads, to educate people through story telling & place names in order to protect them from harm.

Thats why all Christian churches are typically built on natural healthy springs and is considered holy water.

Christian churches are typically in the shape of a cross, Knights Templar churches are round.

And dont look a gift horse in the mouth when its smuggling gold to and from the Crusades! Has anyone tried that in their computer games or is that a knight mare?

> The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc).

Surely you aren't suggesting that mathematics, language, philosophy, or abstract thought in general is only 300 years old. Surely not.

These ideas becoming mainstream - that's what is just 300 years old. Before few people could read...

> governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes.

More like it facilitated small groups taking over larger communities or communally-usable resources, creating governments to manage their wealth and underlings and armies to attack and loot other tribes.

I see all this as the evolution of language, because that's how ideas are preserved and replicated. Ideas evolve over time. They form an evolutionary system, moving much faster than biology. Humans and AI both rely on the corpus of language to learn and apply ideas.

We're no longer the only way ideas can replicate - LLMs have joined the party. Language gained a new mechanism for self-replication. We should focus less on humans vs AIs, and more on the language corpus itself, the true source of intelligence.

This corpus was built through experience, slowly and collaboratively, by billions of people in parallel. No single human could have done it alone - it's smarter than any one of us, the product of our collective work and luck.

When you train an LLM on it, the model becomes generally competent. But did the competence come from the model or the data? Should we obsess over architectures, or look to our datasets?

I've heard that before, mostly on Ray Kurzweil talking about singularity.

But I have a problem with this usage of the "evolution" and "evolutionary system" expressions. I believe that it entails "improvement", that it is judgmental.

I think it is self-centred and presumptuous to imply that the world improved toward us.

I don't think Darwin used the expression "evolution" with a judgmental meaning. He only meant that it was an adaptation to existing environmental conditions.

It's just self replication. Ideas that are useful in some way get replicated, other ideas forgotten. They travel a lot and mutate. They all depend on human interests, but exist beyond individual humans.

Nice to see that the idea of Richard Dawkins' meme lives on, fittingly enough.

And failure to adapt leads to extinction.

AGI has the potential to be an improvement on humans because it has the potential to be relentlessly rational, reality-aware, and self-correcting.

We don't - most likely can't - operate like that. Although we like to flatter ourselves that we're a rational and intelligent species all of us live in an unaware haze of myths, factoids, media-seeded fake narratives, self-serving fantasies, and outright reality denial.

We have a rational process called "science", but politically it lives in a special box. If it starts to interfere with established power hierarchies it's shouted down.

And hardly any humans science at all.

Current AI is just a warm-up for what happens next. Metaphorically it's the equivalent of 8-bit computing. 32-bit AI will be entirely different, very possibly incomprehensible, and potentially far more threatening.

If AGI is something that becomes real, I don't think it would be recognizable to us for long, I don't think it will be a type of steady state even like humans, reading books to it's chidren in the cloud and get really good at coding and similar tasks, and improve itself infinitely (into what?). I think life has a special property in that it is constrained, so it exists. Imagine being able to become pretty much anything, what would you choose?

We can't even comprehend what a system like you describe would evolve into, but I don't think we can even fathom it, it's not going to be like some ultimate task master who gets 18 whole in ones at gold on Friday and take all our jobs, for some reason ?

What I think we're doing is applying our problems and the things we'd want (infinite self-improvement) because they're things we feel would be an advantage to us. A robotic system though? Not sure it would care.

It seems like AI is the ultimate end game, but I'd imagine if we survie the AI era, we'll be past it pretty farking fast.

> Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes

When looking at Europe and all the different languages spoken, along with the over arching religion of the region if not the world, Catholicism, headquartered in Europe, are you not left wondering why they didnt put more effort into getting different tribes to communicate in a common dialect to break down barriers?

Or if Latin was their common dialect, then does it show that royalty and govt's are the divisive one's pitting people against each other, continuing to get a free pass whilst their atrocities are airbrushed out of history?

Controversially, agricultural societies late to industrialization, have more population now and are replacing early industrial societies due to lower birth rates in industrial workers.

So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.

What does the population have to do with the parent's point?

Population advantage translates into victory in simple Darwinian analysis.

Not that I particularly agree in this case but that’s what I learned in my human nature college course.

Now compare quality of life between both.

Quality of life in a very narrow materialistic definition for an individual? Or overall and sustainable society quality of life?

Enjoyment from life.

What is enjoyment though? Suicides, mental health issues, obesity, various substances abuse…

Let alone that such enjoyment is on next generations. Wether by wasting resources, abusing environment. Or generation that will never be born thanks to crappy birth rate.

So much enjoyment and such a high quality of life that people ain’t willing to procreate. Yay. Usually nature reacts in such a way in opposite environment.

> Suicides, mental health issues, obesity, various substances abuse…

Yeah, because those don’t exist in third world countries.

> Let alone that such enjoyment is on next generations. Wether by wasting resources, abusing environment.

Oh boy, here we go.

> Or generation that will never be born thanks to crappy birth rate. So much enjoyment and such a high quality of life that people ain’t willing to procreate. Yay. Usually nature reacts in such a way in opposite environment.

You base your assumption on a belief of good birth rate=good life=what nature thinks is good, which is completely incorrect.

Give me at least one reason why me and my girlfriend should sacrifice her health, career, mental well-being, money and time to do something we both don’t want to?

> Yeah, because those don’t exist in third world countries.

Of course they do. That's just a natural part of human existance. But dealing with those issues is vastly different. Nowadays in „developed“ world people are pretty much left to their own devices. And some asshats go as far as saying that trying to help those who suffering is bad. „Fat acceptance“ is one of the worst.

> You base your assumption on a belief of good birth rate=good life=what nature thinks is good, which is completely incorrect.

That's how it goes in nature, doesn't it? Life form in a suitable environment starts replicating till it meets natural boundaries. Once environment is no longer suitable, it starts to shrink. I wouldn't call it „good life“ or „bad life“. That's just how the world rolls.

> Give me at least one reason why me and my girlfriend should sacrifice her health, career, mental well-being, money and time to do something we both don’t want to?

I don't have to give you a reason. Your environment was supposed to. But this is a very interesting. You're basically saying that a good part of your quality of life relies on not having kids. Not on your high-quality-of-life environment. Vice versa is correct too IMO. People in poor countries would have higher quality of life if they stopped having kids. Less resources towards kids/education/whatever, more towards nice stuff. But this is a bit like maxing out credit cards. And then calling that high quality of life. Just on a societal level. But some people deep in debt seem to enjoy high quality life, don't they? cough US federal debt cough.

Points for originality, at least you don't even pretend to bother to do a denial spiel.

> Controversially, agricultural societies late to industrialization, have more population now

If you pointed the above out 123 years ago, would the British Empire change your mind?

Population is just one metric of success.

>So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.

But they might out live them whilst the manmade chemicals that affect health, like (per|poly)fluoroalkyl (PFAS) that took decades for the law to recognise and legislate against, in much the same way understanding dialects of RegEx in conversation becomes more common place in every day conversation, in order to understand the evolving world we live in.

Has survival of the fittest evolved into survival of the intelligent?

> So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message.

Also McLuhan: every communication medium is an extension of man.

AI is a turbo extension of man's ability to string noises together into meaningful phrases: phrases which, like language in general, project the speaker's thought into the mind of the recipient.

AI magnifies this into a stream of babble that can be generated at zero marginal cost and at light speed, altho with the caveat that the stream may have self-reinforcing perturbations (internal feedback loops ?) that may or may not refer back to "reality".

Analogies are treacherous. There is absolutely no guarantee that just because all these technologies shaped humans, this new one will shape them in similar ways and scope.

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/marshall-...

These are all bad analogies, because they are just better tools. They help with manual labor or the speed of transmission.

Computers actually did replace human computers (literally the origin of the word, people who sat all day and did math).

But now we're creating artificial minds. And I haven't heard a good argument why they can't replace humans pretty much everywhere.

Human minds are limited by the size of the skull. Digital minds don't have that limitation. They can, seemingly, be arbitrarily large (and maybe arbitrarily smart, as a result).

Everyone who says AI won't replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left. Because we out-smarted, out-bred, and out-killed all the others.

> Everyone who says AI won't replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left. Because we out-smarted, out-bred, and out-killed all the others.

Everyone who says AI will replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left because we out-smarted, out-bred, and, especially, out-killed all the others.

And we (collectively, at least, not individually) know where the AI’s power hookups are.

Until it's running off a heavily-shielded fusion battery with a lifetime of a century, I assume? :)

Yeah, don't do that. Just in case.

monontheism is far from an universal consequence of agriculture. It's really limited to Abrahamic religions and religions influenced by them.

Pre-christian Roman empire, Ancient Greece, China, India are all examples of advanced ancient civilizations that were happily polytheistic

I think that homo sapiens was happiest in the hunter gatherer era, right before we've started to think more and more in abstract and conscious ways. Sure, it's cool we can fly humans to the Moon and robots to Mars, but everybody is miserable in the capitalist hamster wheel and an increasing number of people are getting depressed and committing suicide.

The other day I was at the lake and looking at ducks, contemplating this. Is a duck really less happy than an average human? Sure, they can't buy fancy iPhones and might get eaten tomorrow, but it's all relative anyways, right?

And before you start suggesting that I'm depressed: I'm not, I have been lucky. I have a happy life, great job, great friends and family. But still, one can't stop and wonder about these things...

There’s nothing odd about that thinking. You’re just scratching the surface of philosophy and you should continue.

Nothing is an inevitability and tomorrow will look different than anyone here or anywhere else tries to predict.

Don’t stop wondering. But I definitely recommend exploring others’ wondering. Especially when it has nothing to do with tech and all to do with your own existence.

Do you have have any good book recommendations?

Beware dogma. It’s mostly trappings. Study classics, eastern and western and everything besides. Then reading Carl Jung and modern theoretical physicists will then blow the doors off of what you think you knew. Feynman sees ways around everything. Bohm sees behind everything. Whitten’s trying to connect it all together. They will all point you to other readings worth some time.

After that reading Robert Anton Wilson, Terrance McKenna, Ram Dass, and Tim Leary will leave you probably going back to the start to find all of the things you’ve missed. Don’t take them at their word, either. They use a lot of tricks, but it’s just to add perspective.

Then if you’re still feeling wild take a journey through comparative religion and it will add another dimension to it all yet again.

…then you will go all the way out and back again. Don’t take anything for granted. It’s your life you’re living, and all of these writers and more could recognize at least that. Just don’t forget your good humour. Wilson will remind you of that.

Thanks a lot!

> homo sapiens was happiest in the hunter gatherer era

I get the point you're making (progress is an illusion etc.) and have some sympathy with it, but starvation and the constant threat of being killed or dying slowly of a toothache is surely not a 'happy' life.

Personally I think a fulfilling life doesn't need much happiness at all, just contentment with your situation. There isn't much contentment these days, it seems.

> but starvation and the constant threat of being killed or dying slowly of a toothache is surely not a 'happy' life.

But how do you know if a duck is thinking about this? This reasoning only makes sense from a perspective of a 21st century homo sapiens. I think that happiness is relative; I don't believe a duck contemplates how live would be not thinking about where to get the next bite of food.

The same way that people 200 years ago led happy lives. However, a person that lives today but only has access to technology and medicine, while still knowing and seeing that the others have access to today's technology and medicine, would be super unhappy.

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